What is the source of goodness and justice on this earth? Assuming these exist, either it is God who is just and brings justice, or it is us.

Let’s say we, corporately, are the source of goodness and justice. To begin with, we see that the world is essentially unjust: hard-working, well-intentioned people are going through extremely tough times. The solution? Humans in a state of greater material abundance come together, act and justice is served.

This becomes problematic rather quickly, however, because the injustice inherent in the human-effort side of things still eliminates us as the source of goodness and justice themselves. There are also many fundamental injustices that are beyond our control to fix, some of which we create, but many we do not. In an ideal triumph of human endeavour, we might solve taxes, but we couldn’t solve death. So we must start to question what is to blame for all these sorrows and misfortunes, especially when no person or group seems at fault.

First up-to-bat in the Blaming of the Immaterial is God. He’s an attractive target, especially since Christian doctrine professes that He’s the source of all goodness. Next up is Random Chance (or the universe), but that’s a tough one to blame. The materialists try, but they explain away goodness before they lay down the blame for the lack of, so that isn’t exactly fulfilling if you’re out looking for meaning. Finally we have Evil, which we don’t exactly know what to do with. Thus, God tends to take the rap.

Blame for sadness, sorrows and worries is, of course, a complex thing. Material abundance, however attractive as an aim, isn’t nearly the highest good, thus the lesser perceived injustices may yet smack of the Divine. But it’s certain that the problematic view of God as justice arrives in how we perceive unjust suffering and death. For example, when an innocent person gets seriously injured, the surgeons save her and the surgeons are the heroes. If she doesn’t make it, God’s the one who killed her.

I think many people implicitly view God as “The Big Fellow Up There” who causes everything that people aren’t consciously attending to or actively screwing-up. This does, of course, stack the odds against a view that God is just.

I ask you this: how can anyone have faith in a God who murders people? Anyone who does this cannot be just, much less the source of justice. If we are to accept death by sickness or disaster as the will of God and respect the self-murderers as making a sane, legitimate decision, this seems to me to be both an abandonment of the appreciation of God’s gift of life and a grave injustice to our Creator. Think about it: we’re His children. Any father would be incarcerated for killing his kids or, perhaps worse, helping them to kill themselves.

Thankfully, this isn’t the case. George MacDonald said, “If it be said by any that God does a thing, and the thing seems to me unjust, then either I do not know what the thing is, or God does not do it.” God works to destroy sin, not to destroy us. Death and real injustice are results of the Fall, which was the cause of our separation from God, the source of our susceptibility to evil, and the event which messed up Creation far more than we could ever imagine.

Of course, God still works all things together for good, but in Him is justice and therefore He isn’t the cause of all of the “all things.” Even death has lost its sting, for the evil and horror of death is immediately eclipsed in the moment of death’s triumph: Deus-ex-machina becomes a colossally happy ending for the soul. So God is still the source of justice; when we arise to the call of goodness and justice, we act as His agents.